From members of the public to prime ministers, there have been a string of embarrassing incidents which are ironic, at best, or, at worst, downright hypocritical.

In 2009, 41-year-old Nicola Ashcroft
from Bolton was caught claiming £7,000 in benefits while working - in a Job Centre.

Pastor and TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart
was a huge star in the States in the 80s, preaching the Lord's word to millions of viewers. However in the early 1990s, the married man of the cloth was accused of having sex with a string of prostitutes and defrocked.

Notorious right-wing politician Strom Thurmond
fought for decades to maintain racial segregation in the USA. But after his death in 2003 at the age of 100, it emerged he had been keeping secret his mixed race daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who came into the world after he had sex with the maid in his family’s house. She died last year at the age of 87.

Imagine the blushes of Meredyddh Hughes
who, in 2007, was caught speeding at 90mph in a 60mph zone in Wales and disqualified from driving for 42 days. At the time he headed up road policing for the Association for Chief Police Officers and later resigned from the post after being summoned to court for the offence. Hughes, who’s now retired, had previously picked up three penalty points and a £60 fine after he was snapped by a speed camera in Sheffield.

At the 1993 Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, the then Conservative prime minister John Major
revealed a new crowd-pleasing campaign: Back to Basics. His rallying cry to revive traditional values might have seemed genuine at the time, but just five years earlier married Major was still in the throes of an affair with fellow Conservative Edwina Currie. She revealed the fling when she released her autobiography in 2002.

And after being defeated by George Bush in the 2000 US election, former Vice President Al Gore
launched a crusade to persuade the world we were facing ecological disaster and had to develop a cleaner, greener mode of living. But in 2007 researchers revealed that his eight-bathroom mansion in Tennessee consumes almost 18,000 kWh a month of electricity while the average American household goes through just over 11,000 kWh a year.

He made speedy alterations to the house to spare himself any further blushes.